February 23, 2008

We spent another day in the water. First it was back to the southern reef where we snorkeled yesterday. Christy swam predominately with the Meermins who were also looking for conch. Christy has a real nose for finding these creatures. She promised any she found this morning to Art and Elly. She ended up finding 4 so they took 5 conch home to their freezer.

I went spear fishing while they gathered conch. I had seen a huge triggerfish yesterday so he was definitely on my wish list for this morning. Ten minutes after entering the water I came across the same big fish and scored a perfect headshot.

I saw several Grouper hanging around but the season is closed on Nassau Grouper through February 28. I kept trying to convince myself that they were too small so I wouldn’t feel like such a dolt for not taking them just a couple of days before the season opens. Poaching is a way of life here, seasons or size limits mean nothing to anyone except maybe me. After a couple of hours we went back to our respective boats to have lunch before heading to the north end of the island to try our luck again.

About the north anchorage. 15 years ago a friend of ours, Garry, had a streak of the worst and then best luck in this north anchorage. He and a girlfriend had flown down to Flamingo Cay in his amphibious plane to spend a few romantic nights camping on the deserted beach. When they were all packed up and ready to leave he had a mechanical failure during takeoff. The plane cartwheeled violently and crashed back into the water. Both he and his girlfriend were grievously injured.

Now for the good luck part of the story. The only boat they had seen in the entire 4 days just happened to be going by at that exact moment and witnessed the crash. The fishermen raced over and recovered both of them from the wreckage. Then the good Samaritans took them all the way to Georgetown where they were flown back to the states for surgery.

So his plane was lost and that chapter closed until a phone call 5 years ago. A woman called and asked him the story behind the wrecked airplane. She and her husband had come across it while anchored in the area. She was able to track him down because the registration numbers were still legible on the fuselage. When he crashed, the plane had sunk in ten to fifteen feet of water, yet she told him that as a result of storms, the wreckage was now resting in 4 feet of water.

Garry is a part time cruiser who just hasn’t had opportunity to get back to see his plane. When he heard that the Freedoms and we were planning a trip down this far he showed us the spot on the chart and asked if we could retrieve a small token from the plane. So this became the driving force in our trip south.

The first morning we were here I had to make some important repairs on our boat. Jim used the opportunity to dinghy about and search for the wreckage. What he found was in remarkably good shape. Everything from the instrument panel forward was up on the beach while the rest of the plane was thirty feet away, awash in just a few feet of water. By the time I was done with my repair and ready to leave the boat Jim had already recovered the front wheel assembly (the tire still had air in it) and some of the gages that he cut from the dash. I’ve got to admit I was disappointed that after all these miles I didn’t have opportunity to be there, alright, screw disappointed, lets just say pissed.

So today’s trip to the north anchorage was to be Christy’s and my first opportunity to see the plane. The planes nose on the beach was pretty much just an empty shell. So Christy and I donned our masks and snorkeled the remains of the fuselage. Every part of the fuselage that sticks out from the sand is completely encrusted with growth. You can’t even tell what color the plane was. So we were floating about examining this and that when Christy tried to pull a piece of sheet metal from beneath the wreckage. She couldn’t so I got down in a good squat and was able to rip the sheet metal from its resting place.


Lo and behold, she found the holy grail. Still plainly visible on the underside of the metal were the last 3 digits of the planes registration number. Being buried face down in the sand had kept it from becoming encrusted like so much of the rest of the plane. Since we’re evidently bit players in the Jim Show he assumed possession of the piece and is going to mail it along with the other parts back to Garry in South Carolina even though we’ll be passing right by Garry’s home. Yeah, still pissed.

After that we went back to hunting and gathering. The reefs in the north anchorage are fairly substantial but don’t hold many fish large enough to be meal sized. Unless of course, you were a hungry, slightly larger, fish. We did have a good run of luck with the conch though. Christy and I were able to take 8 adult conch in just a short while. We could have taken many more but eight is enough. Whatever happened to Willie Ames?

Once back at the boat we exchanged our snorkeling crap for our conch cleaning stuff and headed for the beach. The “stuff” includes a hammer and screw driver to punch a hole through a specific spot of the shell. Then there’s a fillet knife to slip through the freshly punched hole to cut the conch loose from his home. Then there’s a pair of pliers to evict him from said home. Then of course, there’s a cutting board and another knife for the actual cleaning.

These creatures are the slimiest goo covered things ever. You physically can not get a grip on them to clean them. Think of the slipperiest slimiest thing you’ve ever had to touch and then forget about it, these are worse. You can’t even wash the slime off your hands with soap and water. The best place to clean them is right on the beach. You alternate between trimming the scunge away and rolling them in the sand so you can get a grip, then more trimming, more rolling etc. It’ll all be worth it once these conch are turned into fritters.